CPAC: Republican grassroots vote for 'wacko bird' Rand Paul to lead party into 2016

Republican grassroots signalled fierce resistance to attempts to moderate the
party after last year's heavy election defeat, by voting Rand Paul, a
libertarian and Tea Party firebrand, as the preferred presidential candidate
for 2016.

The "straw poll" vote at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) came a week after John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, called Mr Paul and fellow radical Conservatives in the Senate "wacko birds" for their uncompromising, hardline views.

While the CPAC vote carries no electoral significance, it highlights the on-going internal divisions among Republicans over how to make the party relevant to modern America, where a shrinking white population and more liberal social attitudes appear to favour the Democrats.

Mr Paul, the 50-year-old junior senator from Kentucky, won 25 per cent of the vote after firing up young conservatives with a warning that the Republican party had become "stale and moss-covered" and needed "to embrace liberty in both the economic and the personal sphere".

The moss reference was taken as an overt dig at Mr McCain and other Republican establishment figures who fear that the fiercely uncompromising Tea Party movement and vocal religious conservative grassroots are rendering the party unelectable.

Mr Paul's emergence as a grass-roots favourite has been closely followed by that of Marco Rubio, a 41-year-old Senator from Florida who has taken a more traditional approach, but has tapped into the need for Republicans to make themselves electable to America's growing minorities.

"We don't need any new ideas," vowed Mr Rubio, who won 23 per cent of the vote after calling for a revival of the Reagan-era values of limited government. "The idea is called America, and it still works."

Al Cardenas, the president of the American Conservative Union that organised CPAC, said Mr Paul and Mr Rubio represented the "new generation of conservative leaders" who were prepared to meet new challenges.

The pair were comfortably ahead of a list of other possible 2016 candidates, including Chris Christie, the combative Republican governor of New Jersey, who took advantage of the national spotlight last year as he managed the relief operations after Hurricane Sandy hit his state.

Mr Christie won 7 per cent of the votes despite conspicuously not being invited to CPAC, after being deemed insufficiently conservative by organisers.

Paul Ryan, the budget hardliner and vice-presidential running mate of Mitt Romney last year, came in a disappointing fifth, with 6 per cent. Rick Santorum, the evangelical Catholic, was third with 8 per cent.

The scale of the difficulties facing Republicans was made clear by the recent US census bureau data, which shows that within 30 years the white population will be less than 50 per cent, while in the 2012 election some 82 per cent of non-whites voted Democrat.

On Monday Republicans will unveil a review into what went wrong in 2012. The review is to include recommendations to shorten the exhausting primary season, which had 23 televised debates last time; boost grassroots organisation, and focus on the economic concerns of the middle classes.